grunted for its supper, was
falling into a curve. The great mutilated back which had lifted and then
receded with every breath was still, and Frederick lay like the lump of
clay that he was, in the arms of his foster mother. Tessibel's child by
adoption would never again gather into his slit of a mouth the flies
which favored the sugar. Then Tess, still clasping her dead friend,
lifted her head. A stranger had intruded upon her grief. She gathered
her bruised, sore feet under the short, ragged girl's skirt, and lifted
a woman's soulful face toward the student.

"What do ye want?" she asked sullenly.

"You called me?"

"It were him I wanted," she said hysterically, hugging her little dead
burden.

"The toad?"

"Yep, he were all I had,--him and Daddy, and--Daddy Skinner air gone
too."

Then Tessibel forgot the student, and the forlorn red head with its
burden of curls lay relaxed upon the lifeless Frederick, while the
child-woman wept in abject loneliness.

Impetuously the second Frederick stepped forward, the movement closing
the door with a bang, and causing the candles to lift their smothered
flames and flicker smokily. The wind shrieked through the broken window
and the cracks between the shanty boards. A storm played with the water,
casting its grayness into white capped rollers which beat upon the shore
like the restless spirits of an ocean. Still the girl wept on,--wept for
Frederick, for Daddy, and once a shuddering thought went through her
mind of the Canadian Indian.

"He killed the gamekeeper, Ezy says,--Daddy Skinner," she whimpered.

Suddenly she sat up, her small round face puckered into such lines of
pain that the student turned his head away, feeling dangerously near
tears. He had always been taught, by his father and by his mother who
feared contagion, that of all people in the world, the squatters must be
most avoided; they had no hearts; they killed men and broke the laws
simply for their own gain. But here was a girl magnetically drawing him
toward her. Dirty? Yes, and barefooted, wild-eyed and untaught, but
suffering--and such suffering! Frederick Graves, like his father, would
teach the Gospel of Christ, of peace and good-will to all mankind,--but
the deep burnishing of the beautiful hair as it swept the floor in red
curls had much to do with Frederick's sympathy, for man-like, he looked
upon Eve in her beauty and pitied.

"Your father is Orn Skinner, who shot the gamekeeper to-night?" h